Retro Gaming Theatre Archive

This edition, we’ve got X-Men for the Mega Drive. The game was released around the peak of the X-Men animated series’ popularity, hence why those character designs are used instead of those featured in the comics. Perhaps the most memorable part of the game comes in the fifth level, when Xavier tells you to “reset the machine”. It took me a good week or so as a kid to figure out that you had to reset the Mega Drive. It’s a neat touch!

This video features a run through the first part of the Savage Land at the start of the game. I’m a bit rusty, but I don’t think I did too badly!

It’s been fricking ages since we’ve done a Retro Gaming Theatre post – mostly slackness on our part. I thought in an effort to speed things up we’d try a test run using an emulator to capture the video. Suffice to say I am not pleased with the results, even though the process was a little less painful than using our capture setup.

Cricket season is in full swing, so I figured we’d take a look at the second of two cricket games released for the Mega Drive – Shane Warne Cricket.

It’s not a terribly exciting game to watch, I’m afraid, but it was a marked improvement over the first game, Brian Lara Cricket, adding state teams, fielding errors and a little bit of a graphical makeover. Our video shows a handful of overs from an England v Australia match, with me controlling Australia and bowling.

Alien Storm is one of Sega’s oft-forgotten arcade games from the late 80s/early 90s. It’s a bit like Golden Axe with a few shooting sections, and some pretty cool alien designs.

Like Golden Axe, the Mega Drive version of the game had a few extra levels added for good measure, but the structure and flow of the levels is quite different. We play through the first four levels of the game in the video.

Aladdin was one of the biggest surprises of 1993 – an honest to god high quality licensed game. Virgin, Disney and Sega teamed up to develop and promote the product, and as a result, it was one of the best looking, playing and selling games on the Mega Drive.

Our Retro Gaming Theatre playthrough gives you a sample of the first few stages on the game.

You should all be familiar with our next Retro Gaming Theatre participant – Sega’s arcade smash hit Golden Axe. This is the Mega Drive version – one of the first breakout successes on the machine. It’s not as pretty as the arcade game, but it has two extra stages.

I actually got really into this while recording the video and ended up playing through to (and defeating) Death Adder. We had to cut it there due to quota restrictions, which is kind of disappointing. One day I’ll have faster internets!

Our latest episode of Retro Gaming Theatre takes on the Master System iteration of Wonder Boy. This is my preferred version of the game, probably due to the fact I played it first. We ended up skipping a couple of levels to make the video a bit more snappy – don’t judge us!

It’s arguably one of the best games on the Mega Drive, if not of all time, but Sonic the Hedgehog was the recipient of a totally crude PAL conversion. I decided to take the opportunity to illustrate just how slow and sluggish that particular version of the game is in this latest edition of Retro Gaming Theatre.

This video runs through the first four acts of the game, and a couple of special stages.

This week’s game for Retro Gaming Theatre is Battletoads – one of those games that a lot of people like to bring up, but few have really gone back to play. It’s also a game I do not exactly like a whole bunch – probably because I played it to completion once.

You might notice the video starts to get worse and ends abruptly. That’s because the NES we were playing it on has sat in a dusty house with a bunch of smokers for a couple of years. Not exactly your friendly storage environment. That may mean a hiatus for us recording NES footage until we clean this console or get a replacement console – the other one we tried was even worse.

On the surface, Rocket Knight Adventures seems like another “me too” furry animal platformer looking to cash in on the success of Sonic the Hedgehog, but really, it’s a wonderfully designed, rather challenging platformer with some excellent boss battles, wonderful level design, amazing soundtrack and amusing cutscenes.